Over time, North County's borders blur

The answer to that question has shifted as U-T San Diego rolls out its new North County and Metro editions.

To get our bearings, let’s motor back in time to, let’s say, the early 1950s when North County was huge.

Back then, San Diego’s footprint was tighter, rounder, less sprawling than it is today. Mission Valley, far from downtown, was home to dairy cows, not shopping malls and a stadium.

Three iconic but small highways — 101, 395 and 80 — linked the semidesert “cul-de-sac” (as columnist Neil Morgan used to call his adopted city) to the outside world.

Out beyond the city’s line, a few cities and lots of towns were scattered like stars in the universe. Gobs of open space (or, on the coast, lagoons) separated one from the other, lending each a sense of identity.

To the north, Escondido and Oceanside were the two cities large enough to support daily newspapers, downtown libraries and public hospitals. They were the commercial hubs of a region that prided itself on being far from the madding crowds of The City.

“Everyone has their own vision or story of why they love North County,” writes Pam Slater-Price, the former North County supervisor and Del Mar resident, “but all agree that it is not Metro San Diego.”

So deep was the division that North County firebrands, resentful of the city’s heavy hands on the levers of power, periodically debated the practical wisdom of breaking away from San Diego County and forming a “Palomar” or “San Luis Rey” County.

Ernie Cowan, former Escondido mayor and veteran newsman, tells me he still hears North County folks talk about seceding.

Though the northern, western and eastern borders of this fanciful North County county would be fairly easy to draw, the southern boundary would be another matter. In the south, you’d run into the same sort of north-south debates the U-T’s new zoning has ignited from Ramona to Del Mar.

In the early ’50s, the vast expanse of unincorporated land north of La Jolla and Mira Mesa was undeniably North County. The sparsely populated backcountry formed the buffer that gave a sense of distance, physical and psychological, from the metropolis to the south.

In the late ’50s and the early ’60s, however, the North County map changed dramatically.

The city of San Diego, on a growth binge the likes of which we will never see again, gobbled up Carmel Valley and environs, taking over Del Mar’s eastern flank.

This audacious incursion was followed by an inland campaign in the early ’60s that leapfrogged Poway and claimed the water-rich San Pasqual Valley and Rancho Bernardo, developer Harry Summers’ fledgling master-planned community south of Lake Hodges.

Not coincidentally, North County towns started to incorporate to protect themselves from runaway growth. First Del Mar in 1959, then Vista. Carlsbad, Poway, Encinitas, Solana Beach, San Marcos — they all manned up.

Inexorably, the empty spaces were filled in by houses, strip malls and office buildings. Highways 101 and 395 gave way to Interstate 5 and 15, shrinking the driving and psychological distance from San Diego to Del Mar or Rancho Bernardo.

As North County grew into an economic powerhouse, its tourist industry began to complain that, outside of San Diego, no one knew what, or where, North County was.

A decade ago, Cami Mattson, longtime leader of the region’s hard-charging Convention & Visitors Bureau, and her team came up with the name “San Diego North,” a marketing area that included all of North County and La Jolla.

San Diego North would be pitched as Phoenix’s Scottsdale or, better yet, Tuscany in Italy. It’s the perfect paradoxical place, Mattson believed, a richly diverse playground near, but separate from, a large vibrant city.

In business circles, “San Diego North” has caught on. Though Mattson has moved on — she now works for Cox in community relations — her wordsmithing lives on at the San Diego North Economic Development Council and the San Diego North Chamber of Commerce.

On North County’s southern edge, which (Poway and Del Mar excepted) is largely part of the city of San Diego, the old North County anti-San Diego identity has softened into a belt that probably identifies with La Jolla or Scripps Ranch more than Escondido or Oceanside.

The reality is, North County has shrunk as the city of San Diego has grown. Mayor Bob Filner’s recent visit to Poway Unified schools in the city of San Diego drives the point home.

It’s this evolution, supported by reader surveys, that persuaded U-T San Diego to include the southern “belt” in the Metro edition, not the North County edition you’re holding in your hands (if you’re holding a newspaper).

“North County is a place and a state of mind,” Slater-Price observes.

If you’re a large metropolitan newspaper serving North County, giving subscribers the local news they want and need requires some serious mind-reading.